A talk by Ben Rivers on Playback Theatre and Popular Struggle in Occupied Palestine. Photo: Bhagya Prakash. K

Since December 2011, The Freedom Theatre’s Freedom Bus has engaged thousands of Palestinians and people from abroad in cultural actions that address Israel’s practice of settler colonialism, military occupation and structural apartheid. The Freedom Bus partners with village cooperatives, popular struggle committees and grassroots organizations to hold multi-day “solidarity stays” and “freedom rides” in villages, towns, refugee camps and Bedouin communities throughout the occupied West Bank. These events involve community visits, interactive seminars, guided walks, Hakawati (traditional storytelling), building construction, and protective presence activity.

A central feature of Freedom Bus events is the use of Playback Theatre. Through this method, a troupe of Palestinian actors and musicians invite stories from the audience and subsequently transform each account into a piece of improvised theatre. By sharing stories about the realities of life under colonization and apartheid, community members aim to mobilize audience members in the broader struggle for freedom and equality in historic Palestine.

Irene Fernández Ramos writes for her Storytelling, Agency and Community-building through Playback Theatre in Palestine What is Playback Theatre?
Playback Theatre is a form of non-scripted, interactive community-based theatre created in the 1970s in the United States by Jonathan Fox. A Playback Theatre event usually lasts around seventy-five minutes and it is constructed from the stories of members of the audience who are invited by a conductor to share short or long stories, or ideas, with the rest of the audience. The new storyteller steps forward and sits on the edge of the stage, where he or she is seen by the performers and by the audience. With the help of the conductor’s questions, this new ‘storyteller’ narrates his or her experience allowing the performers to understand the personal feelings lying behind the story and to translate them into improvised theatrical language. Read more on her essay here

Using stories, photographs and video, Ben Rivers speaks about the Freedom Bus initiative and its role within the popular struggle movement.

Palestinian Solidarity Committee in India and 1 Shanthiroad last February organised a talk (Video) by Ben Rivers, a British-Australian drama therapist and co-founder of The Freedom Bus Initiative with The Freedom Theatre in Palestine, on playback theatre and popular struggle in Occupied Palestine. In the talk Ben focused on the cultural activities of the Freedom Bus Initiative, including ‘solidarity stays’ in which the team resides in a village for some days, acting as a protective cover or re-building homes . “We also work very closely with grassroots, popular struggle groups and organisations. We organize political actions together.” Excerpt from the Hindu.com

In his talk, Ben narrated some of his experiences working with the communities in occupied Palestine.

“In the South of the West Bank, in a region known as South Hebron Hills, we were on the outskirts of a village called Atwani, where a very small community lives. A lot of their land was stolen by people of a settlement nearby who were hostile. Palestinians who are grazing their sheep on the hills are regularly attacked by them. Palestinian children used to be stoned by the settlers as they walked to to school.”

Crowdfunding is the practice of funding a project or venture by raising monetary contributions from a large number of people, typically via the internet. (photo/www.blackenterprise.com)

Crowdfunding is by definition, “the practice of funding a project or venture by raising many small amounts of money from a large number of people, typically via the Internet.” Forbes.com

Some of these sites, like Fundraise.com,CauseVox,DoJiggy’s Pledge software andFundly were set up specifically to help non-profits raise money to support their causes. Others, like Kickstarter and indiegogo, aren’t non-profit specific but have been used by charities to raise money to support their mission. Today, let’s talk about crowd-funding websites for non-profits: what they are, and how your organization can use them to raise more money quickly and efficiently.
I have been following many charity driven websites that are profiting from the necessity of people. These domain sites turn-out online business make very easy for anybody that wants to tap into the business to get on board betraying their own people when they use them to support this unethical enterprise. (Fundraising Authority)

Currently there are hundreds wordwide of domains used to collect donations.
Indiegogo and Kickstarter are two of the most successful online companies engaged in the donation business or attracting capital for new ventures, these two companies were create with the idea to help new enterpruniers out in their feet but soon it had evolved to more diverse capital attracting business.Indiegogo, “When your campaign raises funds, Indiegogo charges a 9.0% fee on the funds you raise. If you reach your goal, you get 5.0% back, for an overall fee of 4.0%” indiegogo website.youcaring, “How Does YouCaring Make Money If It’s Always Free for Everyone?

We are supported by thousands of contributors from all over the world who have a heart to help people in the middle of challenging life situations. We are incredibly thankful to our donors for allowing us to continue to help thousands of people everyday.”

GoFundme created October 2010, owner, Andrew Ballester, organization, California Product Shop Inc. whose President is Brad Damphousse a millionaire in the donation business.

The website that you are using is profiting from Gaza, Africa, South America, Syria, Iraq and any other country that suffer war.

The truth is that you do not know who is on the other side of the campaign.

The photo below is an example of a campaign for Gaza, the organizer of the campaign shows to be somebody profile name Jilu, if you click on the link, the the real name shows on a facebook profile as Mohammed Abdulmajeed, which seems to be the same person I interviewed via email, the same person that created IgiveOnline.com, if he is successful on the campaigns he organize he could be making a money out of the misery of Gaza, and if the campaigns that he hosts in his website are successful, he is making double the money.
We could call him entrepreneur, a visionary, a philanthropist, or simply a person taking advantage of a disadvantageous situation. You be the judge!

Rebuild GazaThe campaigner is Mohammed with various projects, his goal 8,000 pounds.

Jilu Miah shows as the organizer of the campaign Rebuild Gaza, click on it and Mohammed real profile appears. (snapshots from IgiveOnline.com Rebuild Gaza

In a email interview Mohammed Abdumajeed said what made him fund Igiveonline. He is a college graduate from the United Kingdom, he is in his thirties and said to work for the education directorate. He studied creative design and worked in sales after college.

“Igiveonline.com was started as a way for me to collect donations for a cause I believed in. After seeing other websites and the charges associated with them, I sought to make my own online page for my fundraising so I could lessen the charges.” Said Abdulmajeed

Igiveonline like dozens other domains had turned out to be a huge revenue for their founders. Abdulmajeed said to have currently 15 to 20 campaigns going on.
These websites work as a gateway for campaigners that find it easy to just open an account and create a campaign, all they have to do is find a cause, register the cause and distribute the links with their friends in facebook or in any other social platform.
At first this look as a really good cause after all these websites work channeling money to people in need, but there is no accountability for the people that create these campaigns, all you need to do is post photos and a credible story and you have a business running.
According to Abdulmajeed he charges 4 percent fee to individuals, 3 percent to Non-Profits and 2 percent to registered non-profit, but who is he to decide who is non profit, or register non profit, is he some government agent with the power to decide who is is who?

I had noticed that few individuals were already collecting money long before the summer war in Gaza, some may be rightly given the money to needed people, some may have been defrauding their friends and followers, we never will know. But, something very very sure, crowd-funding is a booming business and multi-billion dollar business. Some websites collect from 7 to 20 percent depending on the level of advertisement; example of them Indiegogo , youcaring, GoFundme , Igiveonline.com, these websties allow the user to create campaigns where all they have to do is register and write a story about the campaign, these are just few of them, but after the summer assault to Gaza few more pop out.
We can not deny that there is great need in Gaza, and lots of families do not like the idea to go to make line to pick up bags of food, so they are using online campaigns to collect money, besides I heard from many friends that they are ‘proud to beg’, also many young people in Gaza is taking advantage and creating campaigns to buy camera equipment, to build their homes, buy school supplies.
Good or bad the online campaigns are making the CEO of crowd-funding billionaires.
We always have send money to Gaza without the use of NGOs, they have bad reputation specially the managers of the NGOs, they end up keeping lots of aid or favoring their families, that is a all well known situation in Palestine, non only Gaza, but West Bank as well.
Anyway we know better, if we know our friends we help them, if we feel they are cheating then is on us. In the mean time Gaza infrastructure needs to be reconstructed, but it seems that Palestinian Authority started using their leverage on the situation, and their position as “the ones in charge of reconstruction” to crack down on Hamas and take the political power from them.

The real situation in Gaza is not going to be fix by handouts, online campaigns, AID, NGOs, the situation in Gaza first will change when Israel remove the illegal blockade of their borders, and economy, and second, when the Israel occupation get dismantle once and for all.

Gideon Levy, journalist and author, born in Occupied Palestine in 1953 in Tel Aviv, is an Israeli anti-Zionist that has made his mission to write everything about the Israeli occupation, and the dehumanization of Palestinians. He is without a doubt a courageous man, a man of integrity that puts the truth before his own personal security.

“As the late Goldwyn Mayer phrased once, After the Holocaust the Jews has the right to do what ever they want. It took me some years to realize that this old outcome of ongoing process very systematic of dehumanizing the Palestinians which enable the Israelis to feel good about themselves, to feel moral to feel even democrats while, when it comes to the Palestinians they behave so different, I can tell you is a deep conviction that any Israeli, left, right, center does not treat the Palestinians as not equals.” Excerpt from an interview for the film “How we can solve the Palestinians Israeli Problem” by Sami Moukaddem

Gideon Levy is a rare voice of courage in an Israeli media generally supine towards the political establishment. Since 1988, he has written the “Twilight Zone” column for the Israeli daily Haaretz, documenting unflinchingly the myriad cruelties inflicted on the Palestinian people under occupation. Electronic Intifada
Levy was the recipient of the Euro-Med Journalist Prize for 2008; the Leipzig Freedom Prize in 2001; the Israeli Journalists’ Union Prize in 1997; and The Association of Human Rights in Israel Award for 1996.
They haven’t succeeded in silencing me, said Levy.

“I will continue to write about the brutality of this war, about the atrocities, the mass killing of civilians and the horrifying destruction in Gaza.”
Dehumanization allows Israel to strengthen its occupation and deny Palestinians rights, said Levy.
“Gideon Levy is the most hated man in Israel – and perhaps the most heroic. This “good Tel Aviv boy” – a sober, serious child of the Jewish state – has been shot at repeatedly by the Israeli Defense Force, been threatened with being “beaten to a pulp” on the country’s streets, and faced demands from government ministers that he be tightly monitored as “a security risk.” This is because he has done something very simple, and something that almost no other Israeli has done. Nearly every week for three decades, he has traveled to the Occupied Territories and described what he sees, plainly and without propaganda. ” The Independent, September 24, 2010“My modest mission,” he says, “is to prevent a situation in which many Israelis will be able to say, ‘We didn’t know.’” And for that, many people want him silenced.

For some Israelis, he is seen as a brave disseminator of the truth. But many others condemn him as a propagandist for Hamas. And his columns for the Tel Aviv-based Haaretz newspaper have made him, arguably, one of the most hated men in Israel.

“When I joined Haaretz newspaper, I started to visit the occupied territories,” Levy says. “I immediately realized this was what I wanted to do; to understand the brutality and inhumanity of the Israeli occupation.”

“I figured out three things. First, this was the biggest drama facing the state of Israel. Second, this story was not being covered by the Israeli media. And third, this was going to be my life mission – to report about the Israeli occupation to Israeli readers who did not want to know what was really happening
there.”

Israeli journalist Gideon Levy argues that Middle East peace will never come until the Israeli government drops its rejection of basic Palestinian rights. “Sure Israel wants peace, Israel just doesn’t want a just peace,” Levy says. “It is all about justice. You look backward and you ask yourself in which stage, in which moment, was Israel willing to give up the occupation? Give me one example in which there was a genuine readiness to put an end to the occupation. It was never there. It was all about gaining time and maintaining the status quo — namely the West Bank occupied, Gaza under siege, peaceful life in Israel. … If you want the ultimate proof for it, it’s the [West Bank] settlements. Israel never stopped building settlements, and [in doing so] says to the Palestinians and the world, [we] have no intention to give up this piece of land.” Levy also discusses why he has received threats after calling on Israeli Air Force pilots to refuse to bomb Gaza, and why he sees a potential Palestinian effort to take Israel to the International Criminal Court as a positive step.

Israel has no hope, its leadership is crumbling down, their political figures start pointing fingers to each other for the state of affairs of the Zionist entity, the disbanding of the heads of the state will lead the Apartheid State to finally meet its end.
The avalanche that started rolling in 2005 when the Boycott Sanctions and Divestment movement started to take form is rolling down stronger and bigger, together with the recent assault to the Gaza strip that left half millions homeless, indiscriminately high number of civilians killed have the eyes and ear of the world in Israel judging the ‘Jew State’ as the fascist dictatorship, the killing machine. Israel has been called Genocidal, psychopath that executed thousands of civilians in different events,, the latest this last summer that killed more than 2500 Palestinians. Israel list of extrajudicial killings is long, the number of victims in Palestine since Israel was inserted in the Middle East number in the hundred of thousands, the refugees in the millions. Over the years Israel color of victim have wore out to expose its true colors.
The Palestinian lands were illegally given to a group of European victims of the Nazi Holocaust in 1947 in a well crafted plan to disposes millions of native of their lands and homes

Leftist MK Stav Shaffir (Labor), a former leader of the social protest movements, hailed Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s decision Tuesday night to disband the coalition government, firing ministers Yair Lapid and Tzipi Livni.
“The time has come for the public in Israel to internalize that and act together with us to finally replace the government in Israel,” said the young leftist MK, who has vocally opposed the Jewish presence in Israel’s Biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria.
Former Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) chief Carmi Gillon on Saturday night launched a scathing attack on Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government.

“Israel is headed today by a bunch of pyromaniacs and is being led by an egomaniac to its final destruction,” said Carmi Gillon, who spoke at a demonstration by leftists protesting against the Jewish State Law outside the Prime Minister’s residence in Jerusalem.

“The Jewish State Law will eat the body of the entire nation like a cancer. The continuation of the radical and messianist policy on the Temple Mount will bring about a Gog and Magog war against the Jewish people,” he added.

This is the side of Israeli politics seldom seen by the western world and harsh words coming from a man who was once responsible for Israel’s domestic security.

DemocracyNow.org – Amidst a spate of killings by Israeli forces of unarmed Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, we turn to the stunning Oscar-nominated documentary, “The Gatekeepers.” The film brings together six former heads of Israel’s internal security agency, the Shin Bet, collectively speaking out for the first time ever. They detail their methods against Palestinian militants and civilians in the Occupied Territories, including targeted killings, torture, recruiting informants, and the suppression of mass protests during two Intifadas. But in doing so, they also criticize the occupation they were assigned with defending, and warn successive Israeli governments have endangered their country’s future by refusing to make peace. We’re joined by the film’s director, Dror Moreh.

Two important meanings to the direction of rotation of the swastika. Benign sense counterclockwise, luck. Sense evil time, chance. “Use of the swastika by Nazism is linked to the fact that it is a strong symbol, seductive and captivating look. In this sense, served the purposes of Nazi propaganda appeal to the masses” desconstruindo-o-nazismo.blogspot.com

“The world’s most wanted Nazi criminal, Adolf Eichmann’s second hand-in-command, died four years ago in Syria at the age of 98, the Simon Wiesenthal Center said Sunday, citing the testimony of a former German secret service agent deployed in the Middle East,” says The Times of Israel.

How the Simon Wiesenthal Center got a hold of that secret agent’s testimony?

Things are not going as planned with ISIS and the agenda to depose Assad, the president of Syria, now, Israel has to use the holocaust card again to refresh those pitiful memories of Jews dying in concentration camps in Europe, linking Syria with the worse Nazi, what a better moment to bring up the ‘news’ of Eichmann’s ‘best man who send 128,000 Jews to the camps’. If you notice the news is not about Adolph Eichmann that man history books says was the Holocaust architect, but about Alois Brenner.

How the writer knows that Alois Brenner was “described by Eichmann as his “best man,” another question I ask. Israel seems to know the secrets of Nazi Germany!

Now, I ask the ?question, who is this ‘former German secret service agent deployed in the Middle East?’ Would this former German secret service agent be around 100-year-old by now? if he was German secret service agent during the Nazi Germany this article tries to allude, that would had been right before 1945 at the end of the WWII, also this “service agent deployed in the Middle East,” is this means, he was deployed in what is now occupied Palestine, aka Israel? ,if we make memory there was no Israel then at least not before 1945, so, where exactly in the Middle East? who were the Middle East countries allies of the enemies of Germany that needed to be spied upon? This questions bring us to this, Operation paperclip!

We have received information from a former German secret service agent who had served in the Middle East who said that Brunner was dead and buried in Damascus,” Zuroff told The Sunday Express on Sunday.

“Given his age it would not be surprising and the information came from someone who we consider reliable.”

We should consider unreliable any information coming out of the Zionist Entity.

Suastica Symbol

In 1945, Operation Overcast (renamed Operation Paperclip for the paper clips attached to the dossiers of the most “troublesome cases”) began, says Annie Jacobsen.
Jacobsen says, that more than 1,600 Germans were secretly recruited to develop armaments “at a feverish and paranoid pace that came to define the Cold War.
“Although some of these men had been Nazi Party members, SS officers and war criminals, they were valued as vital to American national security.” by Annie Jacobsen in an article written for the New York Times, on Feb, 28, 2014

If Israel is the sacrosanct ally of the United States, and Israel exist because of the U.S., this means that part of these 1600 Nazi members of the S.S were working directly with and for Israel.
Now, going back to Syria, ISIS and the whole mess in the Middle East, why the Simon Wiesenthal Center comes out with this “news” that first and all it is 4 years old, how is that when Syria is in turmoil the news is available?
Like a said, do not believe anything that comes out of Holocaust, Inc.
Marissa Newsman, the writer of this opinion piece made sure to name in the first paragraph Adolf Eichmann, the bogie man of Nazi Germany, even though this article is about Alois Brunner.
In a review in amazon.com for the Memories of Simon Wiesenthal, Scamp Lumm writes the following

Simon Wiesenthal, the most famous Nazi war criminals’ most successful tracker, even managed to find the SS agent who arrested Anne Frank in Amsterdam. I’ve just read how he trailed Joseph Menegele, the malevolent experimental doctor of Auschwitz, to the outposts of Paraguay. He was never apprehended….”

Now I ask, how a concentration camp survivor that has lost everything, properties, family, money finds the resources to become Nazi Criminal tracker?
What’s so amazing to me is Wiesenthal’s outlook despite having lost everything, and especially family members, he wasn’t motivated by hate or revenge in the work he did hunting for Nazis, says Scamp Lumm

The Holocaust Industry written by Norman Finkelnstain can give you more light on the exploitation of the Jews that died during the WWII.

“The Double Shakedown, in which I documented the Holocaust industry’s blackmail of European governments in the name of “needy Holocaust victims” and then the shakedown of Holocaust victims by the Jewish organizations that pocketed the “Holocaust compensation” monies. Norman Finkelnstein

Colonialism was a commercial enterprise abandoned by most civilized states

Israeli forces, Wednesday, took over thousands of dunams in Ya’abad, southwest Jenin, in the northern West Bank, according to the PNN. Additionally, 78 new settlement units have been approved in occupied East Jerusalem.

Director of the Ministry of Local Government, Mr. Ra’ed Muqabel, said that Israeli forces served eviction threats to dozens of citizens from areas near Yaabad (Um Dar, Nazlat Zeid, Zibda, Khiljan and other areas), even though they possessed official documents proving ownership of the property.

Muqabel added that the decision was signed by a military order issued in 2009, and recently adjusted, prohibiting land owners from using their lands for construction or farming.

Like this:

Israel soldiers confronting Palestinian youth in one the weekly demostration in occupied Palestine.

The inevitable is coming, The Zionists’ dream to create a ‘Jew State’ in Palestine, what they (Zionists) insist in calling their homeland has failed. The Zionist apartheid entity has not been able achieved a status of a nation, and time is running out for them, the closest to a State they got, it’s a military dictatorship ‘entity’. They’ forged’ history to their convenience, and after all, all they got was a mimic of a nation. A nation infected with nationalism, with invented threats, inflicting fear into the same soul of the Jew, now more than ever the Jews feel a real threat to their own existence as an isolated group. They will be forced to integrate into society to protec themselves and survive another era.

“The recent UN General Assembly vote recognising Palestine as a state with observer status requires a more complex analysis, but it does reveal Israel’s utter isolation in the world community.”Zionism as a failed project,” by Nivedita Menon”

The global Jewish community has to thank the Anti-Defamation League for fueling a non-existent threat. Now after years of fear-mongering the threat have become real, besides of being victims of Israel’s harvested hate, now they are persecuted as the Zionists want them to believe since the beginning, and now the same global Jewry have discovered the scheme, and they themselves are unmasking the Apartheid Zionist entity.

On Semarian Palestinian Jews in the Holy Land

On the other hand the Palestinian Jews have come to the conclusion that they have always been in their homeland, that promise land that their holy books speaks of. It has always been there , the others, the settlers, the new comers, the impostors and land thieves backed by a militay enterprise called Israel.

Some Israelis supporters Jewish writers blame the progressive Jews for the ills of Israel project, attacking a non-existential threat as real and blaming the Jewish that feel the need of walking away from the Zionist scheme.

“Anti-Semitism is on the rise — and progressive Jews are to blame, according to a recent essay published by the American Jewish Committee (“‘Progressive’ Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism”). Its author, Alvin Rosenfeld, argues that sharp criticism of Israel is equivalent to arguing that Israel shouldn’t exist — which means Jews shouldn’t exist.” said Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, in its article ‘Some Notes on Anti-Semitism from a Progressive Jewish Perspective‘ published in Jews currents in its March 2007 edition.”

What transpire in the ‘Anti-Semitism from a Progressive Jewish Perspective’ is the repetitive argument that ‘everyone is coming to get the Jews,’ and if-you-are-not-with-me-you-are-against-me-argument, Zionists defenders would blame the earth for the fail of their project, but, will never blame themselves for attemping to change history.

“When the state of Israel finally falls it won’t be due to Palestinians, Islamic fundamentalists, anti-Semites or neo-Nazis. No, the final undoing of the Jewish state will be wrought by progressive Western Jews themselves. Zionism, you see, is a right-wing, National Socialist ideology and is in sharp conflict with the tenets of progressivism. When it comes down to a choice between the two, Western Jews, particularly Americans, will choose progressivism and Israel will go the way of South Africa. Increasingly progressive American Jews are not going to be able to reconcile the reality of Israel with the liberal internationalism, open immigration and anti-racism that they have been supporting and promoting in the West for years. The cognitive dissonance will be too much. But don’t take my word for it” Cesar Maldonado said, facebook user”

“And even if the Jews were to win the war, its end would find the unique possibilities and the unique achievements of Zionism in Palestine destroyed. The land that would come into being would be something quite other than the dream of world Jewry, Zionist and non-Zionist. The ‘victorious’ Jews would live surrounded by an entirely hostile Arab population, secluded into ever-threatened borders, absorbed with physical self-defense to a degree that would submerge all other interests and acitvities. The growth of a Jewish culture would cease to be the concern of the whole people; social experiments would have to be discarded as impractical luxuries; political thought would center around military strategy…. And all this would be the fate of a nation that — no matter how many immigrants it could still absorb and how far it extended its boundaries (the whole of Palestine and Transjordan is the insane Revisionist demand)–would still remain a very small people greatly outnumbered by hostile neighbors.” wrote Hannah Arendt in a essay published in The Jewish Writings in 2007″

The facts do not lie, Israel did not take a lesson from history and is now doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.

“We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

In history Jews have insisted in maintaining themselves in isolation, keeping their communities acting as micro-cities, but at the same time inserting themselves into the political system of their states, soon to be controling but without relinquishing their status as autonomous entities.
All throughout history Jewish blocks have been expelled from the states that gave them shelter and allowed them to flourish. The latest example would be the vilified Germany.

Nationalism is bad enough when it trusts in nothing but the rude force of the nation. A nationalism that necessarily and admittedly depends upon the force of a foreign nation is certainly worse. This is the threatened state of Jewish nationalism and of the proposed Jewish state, surrounded inevitably by Arab states and Arab people. Even a Jewish majority in Palestine–nay even a transfer of all Palestine’s Arabs, which is openly demanded by the revisionists–would not substantially change a situation in which Jews must either ask protection from an outside power against their neighbors or come to a working agreement with their neighbors…Read the entire article in Mondoweiss